Regulatory policy will demand a pivot from higher speeds to network coverage and resilience

Intensifying risks mean that policy makers are rethinking their policy approach to cellular mobile deployments. These deployments are acknowledged as critical infrastructure that citizens and businesses rely on. The race for higher peak speeds is being overshadowed by a growing focus on greater network availability, assurances of wider geographical coverage and power resilience.

The tensions at the heart of mobile networks are perennial: subscribers want good quality coverage everywhere at the lowest cost; operators face difficult choices about which network upgrades deliver the best outcome for their customers and for their investment; regulators design spectrum licensing frameworks that ensure consumer needs are not subordinated to the commercial imperatives on profitability.

So it has continued through multiple generations of mobile technology, with regulatory frameworks and competitive dynamics spurring operators to offer the newest technology over the widest area, but consumer willingness to pay has remained flat, despite these improvements to technologies and network deployments.

In the transition from 4G to 5G, the principal drivers for investment have been increased capacity (through new spectrum deployments), and higher throughput/line speed, but these higher speeds are typically only available in some parts of networks, and network quality remains uneven.

In terms of geographical coverage, it is usual for network upgrades to happen first in the most populated (and therefore commercially important) areas, and this has been especially pronounced for the roll-out of 5G. The high cost of roll-out of 5G mid-bands – which provide the highest coverage and a step-change in capability – means that the usual incremental roll-out across the rest of the territory is less certain.

There is an additional aspect of network quality that is becoming increasingly important: network resilience. 2025 gave a series of stark reminders of the vulnerability of critical infrastructure. Outages hit critical internet infrastructure operated by Cloudflare and AWS, among others; solar storms put satellite communications at risk, but perhaps the most striking was the effect of extreme and prolonged heat waves that compromised energy grids (especially in Spain). Such major failure is a particular concern, regardless of whether the source is energy infrastructure, stresses caused by climate change or cyber attacks.

Fixed PSTNs are being wound down in many markets, upgraded instead to fibre networks that are less resilient to power failure. This means consumers are increasingly reliant on mobile networks to provide essential voice connectivity during power failure, but those mobile networks are also dependent on the main grid. While mobile sites often have some level of battery back-up, these solutions vary between and within networks, and typically only last a few hours at most.

In 4G and 5G networks, there is a growing trend for connected assets in the mobile core network, and even between mobile and fixed networks (for example, cloud-based cores). A network failure can therefore result in all forms of connectivity being lost.

2G typically uses separated infrastructure elements, distinct from 4G/5G, therefore alleviating some of the risk of loss of traditional voice and messaging functionality during power outages, as well as data services. In particular, 2G has been a useful fall-back for emergency voice calls as well as for connecting non-handset devices (i.e. machine-to-machine, or M2M). Even the latest mobile handsets will typically spend a portion of time connected to the older 2G networks, especially when in a 4G or 5G ‘notspot’. However, 2G and 3G mobile networks are also deemed obsolete, and many are already retired. From a resilience perspective, shutting down 2G and 3G networks may contribute to reduced options for redundancies.

In preparing for a future that leans ever more heavily on connectivity, regulators are already revising their policy approach to mobile deployments, with a greater focus on power resilience, network availability and quality of service. Communications networks must be assessed using ‘whole system approaches’ to understand resilience. Regulators and policy makers will be looking backwards, to make sure retiring older technology does not cause more problems than it solves, and forwards to ensure future technologies provide what is most needed. With 5G networks still evolving, and 6G on the horizon, policy focus will move away from peak speeds towards achieving better coverage quality and resilience, even if the focus of equipment vendors is on demonstrating the more exciting use cases that this future technology can offer.